3 posts tagged “politics”

My mother seems to spend her time in the Middle East doing several things.  One is crosswords.  Another is causing enough diplomatic trouble for the Australian Ambassador to eye her knowingly at a dinner and say 'Oh, so you're HER.'  Yet another is getting the time difference wrong, calling me in the very early hours of the morning, and then sounding surprised that being suddenly awakened doesn't put me in the mood for long-distance chats.

 

However, the most immediately important thing she's doing- from my point of view, anyway- is collecting a truly bizarre set of stories, which she then recounts to me (in the very early hours of the morning).  The feeling is not completely dissimilar to hearing radio communications from an astronaut in another galaxy- though I'm quite sure that Houston doesn't need to dial nearly as many numbers to contact a shuttle.  You think remembering your mobile phone number is hard, try 42 digits sometime.

 

Here, then, are tidbits from the latest installment, which, because it was made at a reasonable hour, I was actually able to remember this time around.

 

Dubai, being the absolute golden-plated basket case of a city that it is, operates under the delusion that it is an Important World Centre, when most people would probably be hard-pressed to say whether 'Dubai' was a city or an exotic fruit.  Part of this delusion involves having its very own tennis tournament.  Its concession to reality (or rather the twin realities of obscurity and incredible heat) is that the tournament is a charity one, for retired world-class players- 'The Legends Rock Dubai', though perhaps it's less 'rocking' it than 'gently wobbling it around in its squidgy morass of Gucci and tanning oil'.

 

One of said players was Pat Cash, who was there this month, fighting for- some prestige or other.  The fact that Legends Rock Dubai is perhaps not a stringently world-class event is demonstrated by Cash's behaviour with the ball-boy, who was all of eight years old.  (Stop looking at me like that, it isn't that sort of story.)

 

Truncated version: Ball-boy, presumably addled by the heat and the stress of being surrounded by Rocking Legends, throws ball to Cash to serve, manages to hit Cash straight upside legendary head.  I personally would find such aim rather inspiring.  Cash, however, takes theatrical offence, throws balls at ball-boy's stomach, gives ball-boy racquet and tells him 'Go on, see if you can do any better.'  Thrust onto centre court, ball-boy, being eight years old and stunted by continual exposure to air conditioning, demonstrates that he cannot hit the ball anywhere except into the net.

 

Cash proceeds to do the Legendary Thing: picks up stunted ball-boy (still holding racquet) in both hands, and plays the next game using him as some kind of racquet extension.  Opponent is laughing too hard to play properly, crowd is in hysterics, waved-about ball-boy is presumably traumatised for life.  Welcome to Dubai.  (I suppose he's lucky it wasn't John McEnroe, because then he would have been used as the actual ball.)

 

It would, however, be a misconception that the UAE doesn't take sports seriously.  On the contrary: this is a region where sport is everything and everything is sport, up to and including camels, who (brace yourselves) have their very own Official Racing League.  Camels, however, are not very well-suited to sprinting.  Their limbs are designed at best for a gentle lolloping, not a crazed short-distance dash, and are therefore, it seems, unable to get far into the latter activity without getting rather tangled.  They also react badly to loud noises, which means that on the sound of a starter's gun, camels will quite likely lollop off madly in every direction except towards the finishing line, including backwards, or simply fall over on the spot.

 

Further, camel-racing often takes place on a circular track, like horse-racing- but the problem with a moving camel, once it's going in the right direction, is that it's rather fond of moving in a straight line.  If it sees a large curving fence appear in front of it, then, as a boundary on the track, it will not follow said curve- it will simply stop.  (It will not leap the fence; steeplechase camel races are sufficiently against the laws of physics not to even be attempted.  Do not attempt to use your neighbourhood camel to test this.)

 

The way the camel-owners solve this is to park their cars at the curves, and beep their horns loudly at the stopped-dead camels to get them to start moving again.  This means that a competitive time in camel-racing is something of an illusory thing.  It also, of course, occasionally has the consequence that the camels simply turn around and flee back to where they started, regardless of the protests of the hapless jockeys saddled atop their humps. 

 

Oddly enough, Official Camel Racing, complete with commentators, is given large broadcasting time on the heavily-censored airwaves, which represent the Western world solely through variously chopped editions of CBS and NBC, the apparently inoffensive Deutsche News, strangely truncated and stitched-together Oprah episodes where she'll do a telltale seesaw from one weight to another within one half-hour segment, and French cooking shows (in French, undubbed) where various articles are dipped in extraordinary amounts of wasabi and then praised as a delicacy.  Going on this basis, Americans, at least, all have a newscaster's glossy hair, are intensely preoccupied with Book Clubs, and possess the ability to breathe fire.  (Wasabi and I aren't friends.)

 

It sometimes, however, comes down to a choice between a) sitting in one's hotel room eating room-service club sandwiches and watching Oprah interview Sean Penn whilst apparently suffering from schizophrenia, or b) going to a Westerners-friendly restaurant and sitting alongside a German businessman unabashedly arguing with a Korean escort about her rising rates. 

 

(Actually, the latter is how I found out through my mother that the American dollar was weakening, so I can't be over-critical.)

 

And then there have been the more crushing experiences- Nepalese workers informing her matter-of-factly that of course she loves her son more than her daughter; travel agents refusing to speak with her because she is a woman; the inability to venture anywhere on her own without a male escort (no, not the Korean kind), even just to buy flowers.  You think I break my bright tone to speak of them; but this is a different world.  Particularly as a woman, one cannot simply address, lightly, the camels racing backwards without recognising all the other backwards-racing, too. 

On the list of Things You Really Shouldn't Do To Me, above 'pulling my streaks to see if they're real' and 'asking me if I'm ever going to finish my book', is 'be condescending', particularly about the whole being female issue.  Luckily, the few people who've ever tried that have generally been such poor specimens of humanity that they've deserved my pity rather than my incendiary wrath.  (Hence why they all remain alive and retain their limbs.)

 

Today, however, I got a letter.

 

More specifically, my mother and myself both received letters, from the wife of the politician seeking re-election in our constituency.  (Draw me not upon the inanities of Australian elections.  Politics here is 99% blather and 1% small children asking about cactuses.) My brother and father, also sometime residents of this address, were left wholly unmolested by said wife, whose letterhead includes a photograph of herself looking Glamorous But Relatable.  If you're noting a gender pattern here, congratulations, five points to you; but it gets better.

 

Said letter runs to two pages, and contains absolutely no reference to her husband's politics AT ALL.  (I scoured it.)  What it does contain is a thorough, wifely, hearts-and-flowers account of her husband's character: his father's death, his unprivileged upbringing, his 'commitment to family life' through their 25 years of marriage.  'I thought it was important', says Wife, 'for you to have the opportunity to hear about the Malcolm I know and love.'

 

I, being approximately as sentimental as a particularly craggy boulder (I found My Girl mawkish and am often found being sarcastic to small children), find this disgusting.  I also, however, find it insulting, and this is why:

 

One, obviously women are complete political ignoramuses, and need to be provided with special letters all of their very own (oh! how charming! a note from the Mayoress!) outside the normal political commentary of newspapers, television and the general media to make them participate in a big ol' election.  No, it takes a woman-to-woman talk to get us interested in that boring rubbish.

 

Two, because I am a woman voter, defined by my soft heart and good feelings towards my fellow members of breast-kind, I will of course respond with avid sisterhood to a woman's touch in any political material, rather than that scary rough-ridin' tobacco-chewin' yippie-ki-yay masculine discourse they have in them scary newspapers. I mean, EVIDENTLY.  I need something I can read whilst fanning myself gently upon the verandah, which won't stain my petticoats.

 

Three, the central thing to think about when going after my vote is that I am a WOMAN, a woman whose chief concerns are making babies, beds and buns.  The letter contains the assurance that 'Malcolm understands that it is vital for women to have a good work-life balance', because it is of course completely self-evident that for a woman, 'life' and 'work' are two diametrically opposed things which require balancing.  (Probably many career women without children would find it slightly surprising that they don't actually have a life; we should be glad of the Mayoress's touching generosity in letting them know.  Unless, of course, they are lesbians, which in Australia apparently equates to 'single woman with minimalist taste in interior design'.)

 

Of course, being as I'm a tender-hearted woman and all, it seems obvious that my sympathies with regard to voting are located in my personal feelings about the politician's life (oh, he has children, that's nice, oh, his father died, how tragic) rather than in my opinions about, you know, ACTUAL POLITICAL STUFF.  Women?  Opinions?  What a farcical idea; the stress of it makes me swoon!  My stars, where are the smelling salts, Ellie-May?

 

The Wife may be slightly shocked to know that I find her husband's stance on the Kyoto protocol intriguing, and wonder how he reconciles his Catholic beliefs with his stance on abortion.  She would probably be surprised by the fact that I read the Economist rather than knitting booties for my future children. What may startle her the most, though, is the idea that being treated like a woman is pretty much the opposite of what I want from my electorate.

 

Edit: This silly woman's emotivoting plea made the front page of the city's biggest newspaper, so uproarious was the response.  No mention, though, of how it was only sent to women, which makes me hope desperately, for the fate of my electorate, that said gender discrimination was a mistake.  Unfortunately, I still have my doubts.

A telephone call from Doha:

"What did you do today, darling?"

"I finished an essay for uni, Mum.  Went to a party last night.  Not much.  You?"

"Oh, I insulted a suspected mass murderer at a dinner party about his stance on women's rights."

"Ah.  So same old same old, really."

 

If parents are meant by duty to instill a sense of perspective in their children, mine are succeeding admirably, though perhaps not in the way the platitude intends.  A background: my Australian, Caucasian, atheist father works as a director of an architectural firm in the (usually) safer countries of the Middle East, building projects which go from the sublime to the ridiculous to the frankly absurd.  I have no idea how he does it.  I could tell you stories of culture clash that defy imagination: sheikhs quite seriously demanding flying cities or stadiums shaped like gigantic tents isn't even the half of it. 

 

That, however, is not the point of this particular post.  The point is that sometimes my mother accompanies him.

 

My mother is around five feet seven, blonde, and the approximate weight of a healthy 14-year-old.  She is not an intimidating person physically.  She is, however, a self-described hellion.  This, considering that she is operating in a cultural environment which to varying degrees sees women as private beings without right of access to education and power, occasionally causes, um, diplomatic problems.

 

In the past, for instance, she fought with a sheikh over his insistence that his son had the right to go to study in London while his daughter did not- and possibly made the sheikh even firmer in his belief that educated women are terrifying creatures, if they're going to fearlessly dismantle his beliefs over a dinner table.  Today, however, she shared a story that was so extraordinary the only logical next step was to tell the internet. 

 

Somehow, due to the colossal oddness of the Arabian wealth 'scene' where most of my father's clients percolate, she ended up at a dinner party sitting next to a condescending elderly man whom she worked out, through a combination of memory and talking to his faintly indiscreet wife, to have once been a senior member of a political regime infamous for its colossal bloodiness.  I will not mention which one because I don't want to cause trouble, but we're talking significant genocidal crimes against humanity here.  I have no idea what he was doing in the Middle East.  This was a man who, based on the evidence, is likely to have committed stuff the International Human Rights Tribunal normally has conniptions about.  BAD THINGS.

 

And, of course, my mother, noticing during the (understandably strained) conversation that his wife and daughter did everything for him- served his food, poured his tea, translated when he decided not to speak English- decided to ask him whether he was capable of pouring his own tea or doing anything for himself. 

 

"That is what women are for," responded Probable Mass Murderer, and my father promptly averted his eyes.

 

The conversation fortunately did not escalate to anything explicitly undiplomatic, but this was the parting exchange: the man, who apparently was Muslim, said he would teach my heathen mother to pray, to which she responded that she thanked him, and to show her gratitude she would bring along some rubber gloves and teach him how to wash up.

 

If anybody asks what my mother does for a living, I think I may answer "professional hell-raiser."  I doubt she would object.